Rogue

By raindare

I’ve always been fond of the game Rogue. I think, at first, it was because I encountered modern roguelikes like Nethack and Angband first — and then I was impressed by the sleekness and purity, in a sense, of Rogue’s design. There are no smoothed edges, no quality of life enhancements, and not even that many monsters drawn from Dungeons & Dragons. Just you, a dungeon of 26 levels, and 26 monsters that will eat your face off with nearly realistic lethality.

In a sense, Rogue and its variants are like the original Megami Tensei series. They contrast their better known and greatly iterated upon successors, in Nethack and Shin Megami Tensei respectively. And they both have their own unique flavour and charm compared to their successors, at least to me. Maybe that’s why I was motivated to write about them now.

So what is Rogue, and playing Rogue, actually like?

Well…

Rogue is hard.

In fact, the earliest versions of Rogue create dungeons that are not guaranteed, or even likely, to be beatable. It’s possible to never find enough food to survive, even if you play optimally, and it’s possible to never get the gear you need to survive in later levels of the dungeon.

However, as I mentioned before, Rogue had successors. Not distant successors, like Nethack or ADOM, but children and grandchildren. These variants… didn’t always solve the problem of unwinnable games, and often they made the game harder. But they still gave it a robustness of mechanics that it didn’t originally have.

Those mechanics were often taken directly from D&D, in a fashion Nethack eventually distanced itself from. I can see why, especially given that Nethack’s golden age coincided with when TSR was at its most litigious. That said, there are very few OD&D games, and even fewer good ones, and as someone who GMs often, sometimes you just want to go on an adventure yourself. That’s another part of the appeal, to me.

Also, Rogue itself is incredibly well-documented. There is at least one source that has already combed the code for every possible bit of information about it. There are many surviving guides as to how to beat it. And of course, it had multiple commercial or shareware releases. Here on Juraku Bookstore, we often avoid the beaten path, because the woods hold something of interest. So now, I’m going to focus on its variants.

Specifically, on ARogue and XRogue, the variants from which I developed my own.

ARogue introduces classes to Rogue, which as noted above, is originally a classless game. It also expands the roster of attributes, adding Intelligence and Dexterity alongside Strength, and adds many more monsters, magical artifacts, and much more.

In other words, it’s very much bolting even more of OD&D onto Rogue’s chassis. And as someone who’s craved a proper OSR RPG for some time, I was quite happy with this.

Then there’s ARogue 7 and XRogue. These versions went even further, introducing assassins, druids and a slew of named figures from the D&D monster manual, alongside more robust and well-defined features. Going by the games played on RLGallery, XRogue is the most popular variant, and it certainly does have the most *stuff*.

XRogue is based on ARogue 5 from 1985, but there are later versions of ARogue itself, going up to 7.7 and dating from at least 1986. The games are very similar, but a look through the documentation and the source code shows some notable differences.

• In ARogue 7, attributes cap at 25 before equipment such as rings. In XRogue, they cap at 50. In ARogue 7, characters start with 72 stat points, while XRogue gives 74.
• In XRogue, every character can in theory make multiple attacks per round, but this starts at level 25 for the fighter and level 60 for most other classes. In ARogue 7, fighters get their first extra attack at level 10, and only paladins, rangers and monks get any later on.
• In XRogue, each spell list has 16 spells. In ARogue 7, the magician and cleric have slightly more.
• XRogue has several uniques that ARogue 7 does not, such as Charon.
• In ARogue 7, the ranger can use both magician and druid spells, while in XRogue, they can only use magician spells.
• XRogue allows monks to use druid spells, which they cannot do in ARogue 7, but it also makes them “good-aligned” and able to fall like a paladin or ranger.
• In ARogue 7, assassins but not thieves can use bastard swords. In XRogue, both of them can.
• In ARogue 7, a fallen paladin or ranger becomes a fighter. In XRogue, they become an assassin. Also in XRogue, killing uniques can cause you to fall, which is not necessarily an issue in ARogue 7, and XRogue will impose other penalties even if you don’t fall, such as paralysis or embarrassing flavour text.
• XRogue has a command to show character effects directly. ARogue 7 does not.

Overall, ARogue 7 is more robust and, in the case of “good-aligned” classes, noticeably less malicious. It’s also closer to 1e D&D. For example, monks in 1e D&D are non-casters and can’t fall from grace, which matches ARogue 7. On the other hand. XRogue is a bit more wacky in what it does and allows, similar to Omega, and that has value of its own.

Having said all of that, you may have noticed the source code on offer at the beginning of this page. That’s my personal variant of XRogue 8, called AXERogue. I didn’t want to change much about the game, but there was just enough that I went ahead and did it. I suppose that makes me a roguelike variant maintainer!

My major changes for AXERogue are as follows:

• Many changes from XRogue have been reverted, such as the inflated stat cap.
• Quality of life changes from XRogue have been kept intentionally, such as selecting your quest item or viewing your active effects.
• New content from XRogue has mostly been kept, such as the added uniques.
• The player receives 80 points to spend on attributes, up from 72.
• Various changes to weapons and armour, both in their effectiveness and who can use them. These are more or less documented in the revised manual.
• Magic users, clerics, druids and monks have been compensated for other changes. These changes are more or less documented in the revised manual.
• It’s significantly harder for paladins and rangers to fall. This is because it’s easy to blunder into a non-hostile creature or two, or for mazes to place them where you can’t avoid fighting them. There remains a chance to change class after too many kills, and it’s cumulative, so good-aligned characters should still avoid fighting elves and gnomes.
• A new artifact has been added: the Grand Grimoire.
• Several new items, including scrolls of blessing.
• Several new dungeon features.
• Several new endgame monsters.
• Monsters can now use abilities that previously didn’t function due to bugs, while others have had excess abilities removed.

Download the AXERogue 0.9 source code (~318 KB), my own variant building on the XRogue sources as preserved in the 2021.03 version of the Early Roguelike Collection as found The Roguelike Gallery.

A few installation notes:

• You’ll need to compile the game with autotools, the ncurses library, and a C compiler tolerant of tricks relied on by past authors with C function pointers. Clang 19 should be fine. Clang 21 will not be.
• On a Debian Linux install, "automake" "libncurses-dev" and "clang-19" should be sufficient to satisfy all of the above.
• Within the extracted source folder in your preferred terminal, run "autoconfig", "./configure", then "make". Run the generated "axerogue" binary once all of that is done to play the game.
• Very new computers may run into occasional issues. The configuration script doesn’t detect Apple Silicon, though it detects macOS. For me, this caused the occasional double free error. You may want to back up your save file every so often.